The man who gunned down John Lennon could be free before the end of the year after applying for parole.
Mark David Chapman shocked the world when he pumped four bullets into the former Beatle outside his Manhattan apartment building almost 20 years ago.
He admitted afterwards that he stalked and shot Lennon to give himself an identity.
"I had to usurp someone else's importance," he said. "I was Mr Nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on Earth."
Now Mr Nobody, who was given 20 years to life, has his first opportunity to seek parole because he is approaching the end of the minimum sentence.
At 45, he has been a model pisoner and born again Christian in New York's Attica Prison.
Some insiders believe that the parole board, which considers his request next month, is so impressed with his behaviour that it will let him go free.
Others say that in view of the current tough-on-crime polictical climate in America and the fame of his victim, Chapman is likely to remain behind bars until his next parole request is allowed in four years.
There is also the question of Chapman's own safety. In jail, he is segregated from the other prisoners for his own protection.
If released, he could be a target for assassination by fans who can never forgive him for killing Lennon.
Hundreds of people a day visit the Strawberry Fields memorial that Yoko Ono built for Lennon in Central Park.
It was on the afternoon of 8 December, 1980, that Lennon was photographed outside the Dakota building on Central Park West signing an autograph for tourist Mark Chapman.
That evening, as the star walked home with Yoko Ono from a recording session, he was ambushed by the same man. Chapman fired five shots, four of which hit Lennon in the back.
In custody ever since, Chapman has a cell to himself in a special unit. His only contact with other prisoners is when he is escorted to and from the prison law library where, under the eyes of guards, he helps select books.
He is allowed visitors twice a month. They include his relatives and author Jack Jones, who wrote his biography, Let Me Take you Down.
Interviewed in 1990, Chapman talked about the night he shot Lennon. He said: "It was an end of innocence for that time. And I regret being the one that ended it."
Yoko Ono's spokesman, Elliot Mintz, said Lennon's widow will probably be asked to offer her views, but she wants to follow the appropriate protocol.
This year, she told a television interviewer that if Chapman was free it would leave her and Lennon's sons, Sean and Julian, vulnerable.
Under the law, parole officials are obliged to consider the gravity of the inmate's crime.
Mr Jones believes that while Chapman has been well behaved in jail, parole is unlikely. And inmate advocate Robert Gangi of the Correctional Association of New York agrees.
"There's not a chance," he said. "Anyone convicted of the murder of a famous person is probably unlikely to ever get parole."